Monday, August 24, 2009

Arkansas Preview/Where should we poll?

We were due for a New Jersey poll this week but we skipped it to do Arkansas instead.

Here's what's coming from the Natural State this week:

-Tomorrow we'll have numbers related to Barack Obama. A few hints to give you an idea of the landscape there right now: less than half of white Democrats support Obama on health care, fewer than half of voters overall think Obama was born in the United States, and 64% of independents think Rush Limbaugh has a better vision for the country than the President.

So the plan when we did Arkansas was to just not poll New Jersey again until September, as polling there was becoming a broken record with Chris Christie holding an outside the margin of error lead in poll after poll after poll. But the last few weeks haven't been too good for him...

So that makes it tempting to skip Virginia in the cycle instead of New Jersey, but it would also be interesting to see if Creigh Deeds going up on the air is narrowing things any.

So since we want to survey whichever state is of greater public interest, we're just going to let you vote and decide at the top of the page. We'll poll the winner this weekend and it will come out next week, the other state we won't go into the field again probably until mid-September.

Would you guys be willing to confirm this past weekend's Mason-Dixon NEVADA poll, which showed Reid in a bit of a pickle? Mason-Dixon's methodology is a bit favorable to Republicans, however, it might just be that polling in Nevada can be pretty difficult.

While it doesn't look like it will happen given the numbers right now, a New Jersey poll would be a lot more interesting than another Virginia poll. If the rough patch that Christie's seemingly hit right now isn't bringing his numbers down, then Corzine is pretty much doomed.

If you really want to see who is surging in the Arkansas Senate race, you have to take a look at Trevor Drown. Independents are on the rise in Arkansas and Trevor Drown is the ONLY independent running. Any poll that ignors Trevor Drown has no creditability.

I'm for VA, however I think that you should look into polling North Dakota. Its economy has been growing, not shrinking, which means that either Obama will get a massive boost, or that the state's natural redness will contribute to the mindset that he didn't do anything. Plus, the Dorgan/Hoeven race would be interesting.